I didn't read the whole thing, but I have thought about that particular part of the game (Cloud's approach to Aeris in the Capital) a lot lately and am kinda annoyed that someone noticed and wrote about it before I did

I never thought of those scenes in that deep sense. I simply thought of them as (guess what x) frustrating! And that they did replace what could've been text or movies. Thinking of the article, I now appreciate the scenes a bit more.

When I played Final Fantasy 12, I sometimes thought of how routinely the 12 is compared to FF7, that all of the game plays through 1) battle trips on foot, 2) some short dialog cut scene in-between each trip, and 3) some shopping in-between. You know...

FF7 was much more of a mess! Dialogs between random encounters, and interactive objects! (wow) and some story in cities.